Printing elevations very SLOW with vectorial fills

[Anonymous]

We are trying to print elevations of walls with vectorial fills and shadow. It takes a long time, up to 60 seconds per A1 sheet at 300DPI. It was 30 MINUTES until we turned off Marked Distant Area.

Is there a faster way? Are Symbolic Fills quicker? Whay is Marked Distant Area slowing everything down?

[Barry Kelly]

Are you printing to PDF first and then printing that or going straight from Archicad or the layout book to the printer?
Barry.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the Reply.

Both. And both take a 'long' time. When we were using Marked Distant Area, the file size of the PDF ended up at 2-3Mb. Now we are down to 200kb.

Still, it feels wrong, and even the screen build-up and updates appear to take a while. (This could be a problem with the corporation's standard video cards - NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 ??)

So, is there an ideal way to use the Vectorial Fill?

[Anonymous]

I know how you feel... I have 3 sections of a building with vectorial sun shadows, each one takes at least 10 minutes to update, plus 10 minutes for them all to update on the layout book... I've yet to print them ( A1 300DPI ) at university, but I'm hoping they will come out fast, otherwise everyone in the CAD room will hate me and it's already busy ( typical waiting time is 90 minutes to get your print as there are 3 years of student printing for Wednesday

[Haneef Tayob]

You might want to look at the definition of the fill.
If you can make the basic vectorial fill component to be as large a unit as possible, it might reduce time and even conversion file sizes.

Say for instance you have a horizontal lines fill 85mm apart in the vertical direction. Try to define the x length as 50m, rather than a small units of say 100mm. The y distance will be 85mm. If you have a 10m wide wall, the number of horizontal lines will now be minimal than if you had set the horizontal lengths as 100mm.

Hope I'm clear enough.

[Anonymous]

That's sounds good Haneef, we'll try that. And would you use Vectorial Fill or Symbolic Fill? Is there a difference in speed?

Does anyone know what the difference between them is? We have a few copies of the manual, but while we understand how to make both of them, we are not sure of the actual difference between them.